We’ve had a few strange visitors to our urban Elk Grove home over the years. If you don’t count family, the friends we’ve invited or the girlfriends they brought with them, we’ve still had at least three worth mentioning, and all of them occur regularly in nature; just not in our neck of the woods. In the last 9 years, one scorpion, and two crawdads made our home theirs.

The scorpion was our first visitor, and actually he made our neighbor’s home his. Most people will live their whole lives never seeing a scorpion in its natural habitat. I’ve been lucky enough to seen them 3 or 4 times, but that was where you’d expect to see them. At Lake Havisu we camped on the ground in heat that never got below 90 degrees all night. I awoke to the commotion of other campers screaming and yelling. There were hundreds (possibly thousands) of large black scorpions crawling across the ground all around us. We spent the long sleepless night fending them off. I also had the pleasure while hiking down the Grand Canyon of coming across an albino species seeking shade deep in a crag in the canyon wall. He was large, thick-bodied and frankly, a beautiful species, unlike the creature that visited our neck of the woods.

It was nearly 10 years ago that our next-door neighbor came running over with a small, thin, brownish specimen of scorpion that he found at his house. Make that IN his house. Worse than that, it was crawling up his 3-year-old daughter’s wall! I probably wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t caught it in a mayonaise jar and brought it over for my perusal.

As unbelievable as it seemed, his research deemed the California Brown Scorpion as a relatively frequent visitor to homes in the Sacramento Valley. (My neighbor called the department of Fish and Game. Apparantly scorpions are considered game.) At the time of this invasive encroachment, there was no internet per se, but today I was able to do a bit of research, and the best I could come up with was a description of a wind spider, which is actually not a spider, but related to the scorpion:

Your comely specimen is not a whip scorpion, but a wind scorpion, also know as a sun spider, scorpion spider or false spider, and belonging to the order Solpugida. They do not have claws on their front legs, which are known as pedipalps, but they do have suction cup like tips that enable them to walk up glass and other slick surfaces. They are voracious and formidable nocturnal hunters that rip their prey to shreds. They have strong jaws that can inflict a painful pinch, but they have no stingers nor poison, so though fearsome in appearance, they are harmless to humans, but deadly to creatures near their own size.

Then there’s the crawdads. The first one seemed dead and was curled up between the lawn and the mow strip in that little crack that the edger makes when you cut too deep. He was in the one spot that gets the most water since there’s an extra sprinkler there and that area always seems to be flooded. Apparently not enough though.

Now I might have written this off as some kind of hoax or fluke. Perhaps some jokester threw the poor thing out of a car window as he drove by. After all, the nearest creak is nearly 3 quarters of a mile away. But then two days later another one comes crawling out. This time from the backyard. He seemed to be burried in the mud that I dug up while planting some plants. He’s the critter in the photo, but I only wish that I took a pic of number 1. He was at least twice the size, so big in fact that I mused that he may actually be a lobster.

Yes, we don’t have bears in these parts, and the skunks pretty much leave us alone. I’ve seen a coyote when we first moved in and the areas around us were still meadows. We rarely even see the many rabbits that once populated the area. Of course there must be a reason that this area’s called Elk Grove, but I’ve never seen an elk anywhere. Perhaps it should have been called Crawdad Gulch.

By the way click on the photo of the little guy to see him in all his glory.